Case Number 13295

SHARPSHOOTER

The Charge

Caught in the crossfire.

Opening Statement

When action movies are this bad it's amazing that people would still purchase
DVDs with explosions on the cover.

Facts of the Case

Dillon (James Remar, The Warriors) is an elite black ops soldier for
the government, a highly-trained killing machine who's dispatched whenever Uncle
Sam says a scumbag needs dusting. After a typically flawless and bullet-riddled
rescue mission in the Middle Easy, Dillon returns home confident that he was on
his last mission.

But when his best friend Flick (Mario Van Peebles) pleads with him to take
up one more mission, Dillon is skeptical. He's lasted this long -- why push his
luck? But he'll end up digging deep within and summoning enough violence to take
on a ruthless gun-runner and his squad of incompetent bodyguards.

The Evidence

Sometimes I wish I could just say "This movie is lame, don't
bother" and be done with it but we have to give everyone their day in
court, I suppose, so here are some more paragraphs that essentially say
"This movie is lame, don't bother."

The very first thing that will present itself is the low-quality feel to
everything going on. The film just "feels" generic and economy-sized,
from the simplistic score to the awful acting to the clumsy action sequences and
the frequent and sometimes laughable breakdown in common sense and, finally, to
one of the worst Final Bad Guy Death Scenes ever. From top to bottom,
Sharpshooter has the look of amateur hour.

A few illustrations:

Incomprehensible explosions. Cheap and pointless pyrotechnics are a
sure bet that the filmmakers were desperate to add zing to their creation and
felt action pictures go hand in hand with giant explosions. There are explosions
present and accounted for, but the manners in which they detonate are taken
straight from The Dukes of Hazzard playbook , a.k.a. How to
Manufacture Nonsensical Fireballs Out of Thin Air. For example, one shot of
Dillon's sniper rifle is enough to make an SUV explode. And the culmination of a
chase scene leads to another SUV slamming into a pile of rocks and the engine
explodes, then, a few minutes later, when the script requires Dillon to be saved
with a distraction, it explodes again.

Stupid A.I. There really isn't any suspense to be found here because
the bad guys are such idiots. Take the time when Dillon is captured and ordered
to be killed, and of course, he can't just get shot in the head then and there
but has to be taken to a boat house that is custom-built for escaping from
mentally handicapped henchmen, which Dillon promptly does. Check out the scenes
where Dillon manages to flip a bad guy over and knock him out by reaching out of
the water and using only his superior wrist strength; then while the other bad
guy looks into the water with his rifle sighted, Dillon pulls himself out of the
water, climb onto the deck, and still managers to catch the dude off his guard.
Dillon could run around the compound with a Nerf gun and cymbals strapped to his
knees and still emerge unscathed.

Dumbass Ending. The final confrontation ends with -- Spoiler Forthcoming -- Dillon fashioning a bow and arrow out of
his rifle, gun-strap, and a pointy stick, which of course he uses to impale the
final villain. Following that physics-defying escapade, Dillon wraps up his
adventure by compromising his principles and flying to an island with $25
million worth of dirty gunrunning money.

DVDs don't get much more basic: 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and 5.1 Dolby
Digital and nothing else.